thundergolfer

Work in USA for exposure to good tail outcomes, have Aus citizenship as a refuge from v. bad tail outcomes.

Having been early at a startup that relied on Postgres I think this post doesn't put enough focus on monitoring and alerting. Postgres has a few key failure modes that you want to avoid ever happening, and you can use alerting to get early warning that you're danger of it happening.

For example, AWS will send you an email if you're approaching XID wraparound. In a startup that email is very likely to be missed, especially if it's sent on Boxing day. You want whatever AWS is watching to send you that email to be something connected to a pager.

Not really that related. Refinement culture is concerned with evolving aesthetics and marketing which is partly a response to globalization and the rising middle classes of asia, partly related to digitization, and partly just a normal evolution of style.

What George is talking about here is much more related to the ideas of Nick Land, technocapital, Marshall McLuhan, and man's relationship to industrialization.

> Isolation is basically impossible because the Internet follows you everywhere. And it’s perfectly uniform, there is no other Internet, just a place with five corporate towns and some Chinese ones that are really hard to visit if you don’t speak Chinese.

This is McLuhan's "global village".

> I don’t think I’m properly capturing the scope of the machine. First you build the fence to keep the animals out then you build the fence to keep the animals in. It’s a Fullmetal Alchemist homunculus maybe it has already eaten your soul.

This is Nick Land.

Major Sandbox providers (e.g. Modal) run on non-hyperscaler bare metal not AWS and so don't need to markup on AWS's markup. Thus, prices are comparable or better than AWS.

You're talking about AWS Lambda?

- Their use of bare metal isn't necessarily the latest gen hardware - AWS Lambda is part of AWS, and obviously has privileged access to supply

Unfortunately supply is quite limited. If you want to horizontally scale on these instances you need to have a good relationship with AWS so they'll give you a big allocation before c9i is a thing.

> Well, we tried switching back to GitHub Actions, and… yeah it still sucks. Blacksmith has grown explosively because it makes an increasingly frustrating bottleneck in the dev cycle faster.

Where's the "grown explosively" bit coming from? Google doesn't have growth news from 2026, only early 2025.

No a Ponzi scheme involves not output, but here there is very much output in the inference being sold by Anthropic. Pretty big difference.

> That means each employee's AI spending cap is ~11% of that median compensation package.

Probably better to use the fully-loaded cost of the engineer, which is much higher than their compensation package. The fully-loaded cost is the total cost paid for the labor power of the engineer, and it includes big ticket items such as office space, food, equipment, insurance, payroll tax, fringe benefits, recruiting costs.

If the median compensation package is $330k/year then the median fully loaded cost is probably around $450-500k.

This is downvoted but's it pointing out a fundamental dynamic in capitalism. Labour activists had to intervene in this dynamic to protect workers from being exhausted by the constant need for capital to increase labour exploitation to increase profits.

Almost this entire thread is people discussing a labour issue with no reference to the fundamental antagonism between labour and capital.